110+ Meryl Streep Quotes On Acting, Patience And Versatile

Meryl Streep is an American actress who has been active in the film industry since the 1970s. She is widely considered to be one of the greatest actresses of all time and has won three Academy Awards, eight Golden Globes, and two Emmy Awards. Streep has appeared in numerous critically acclaimed films, including Kramer vs. Kramer, Sophie's Choice, The Devil Wears Prada, and The Iron Lady. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Meryl Streep on acting, life, patience.

Top 10 Meryl Streep Quotes

1. The formula of happiness and success is just, being actually yourself, in the most vivid possible way you can.
2. The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy.
3. Everything that truly makes us happy is quite simple - love, sex and food!
4. What makes you different or weird, that's your strength.
5. The minute you start caring about what other people think, is the minute you stop being yourself.
6. It's bizarre that the produce manager is more important to my children's health than the pediatrician.
7. Everything we say signifies; everything counts, that we put out into the world. It impacts on kids, it impacts on the zeitgeist of the time.
8. You have to embrace getting older. Life is precious, and when you've lost a lot of people, you realize each day is a gift.
9. You can't get spoiled if you do your own ironing.
10. Pretending is a very valuable life skill.

Meryl Streep Short Quotes

• You don't have to be famous. You just have to make your mother and father proud of you.
• True freedom is understanding that we have a choice in who and what we allow to have power over us.
• Motherhood has a very humanizing effect. Everything gets reduced to essentials.
• There is some liberation in the freedom of being totally alone and really going for it.
• People want what they want. Sometimes you just have to walk in defiance of it and just be yourself.
• Having been let out of the barn once, I know I wouldn't be happy if I were home all the time.
• There's no road map on how to raise a family: it's always an enormous negotiation.
• Being an actor lets me be a million different things.
• The greatest gift given to man by God - is the ability to empathize.
• Instant gratification is not soon enough.

Meryl Streep Quotes About Acting

The best thing about acting is when you're playing a scene and you actually become your character and lose yourself in that moment. That's when you know you've been succeeded at what you've worked very hard to accomplish in your profession. Those are the truly thrilling moments. — Meryl Streep

All an actor has is their blind faith that they are who they say they are today, in any scene. — Meryl Streep

Acting is not about being someone different. It's finding the similarity in what is apparently different, then finding myself in there. — Meryl Streep

I think the most liberating thing I did early on was to free myself from any concern with my looks as they pertained to my work. — Meryl Streep

I'm curious about other people. That's the essence of my acting. I'm interested in what it would be like to be you. — Meryl Streep

Pretending is not just play. Pretending is imagined possibility. Pretending, or acting, is a very valuable life skill and we do it all the time. — Meryl Streep

Everyone is interesting. Everyone has something unexpected to offer and the job of acting is to pull it out of each other. — Meryl Streep

Acting is my way of investigating human nature and having fun at the same time — Meryl Streep

Women are better at acting then men. Why? Because we have to be. If successfully convincing someone bigger than you are of something he doesn't want to know is a survival skill, this is how women have survived through the millennia. — Meryl Streep

Singing and acting are very similar. Singing makes you reach into your deepest feelings. Singing is an extension of everything that you do when you're acting. — Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep Quotes About Life

Integrate what you believe in every single area of your life. Take your heart to work and ask the most and best of everybody else, too. — Meryl Streep

I believe in a world of opposites and that’s why I avoid people with rigid and inflexible personalities. — Meryl Streep

I never give any character I play less respect than I give my own life. — Meryl Streep

I have always regarded myself as the pillar of my life. — Meryl Streep

America doesn't reward people of my age, either in day-to-day life or for their performances. — Meryl Streep

I have a holistic need to work and to have huge ties of love in my life. I can't imagine eschewing one for the other. — Meryl Streep

I have a very busy life, and not many people who have a career and four kids go out a lot to the movies. — Meryl Streep

Life is all about making choices and I'm very happy with mine. I have had a wonderful time raising four children and I've also been lucky to have the support of a wonderful husband. — Meryl Streep

I have a very good life - I'm lucky enough not to be deprived. — Meryl Streep

It's very humbling to imagine somebody else's really life and their pain ... It's my drug. — Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep Quotes About Work

We need art as much as we need good works. You need it like food. You need it for inspiration to keep going on the days that your low. We need each other in that way. — Meryl Streep

The work itself is the reward, and if I choose challenging work, it'll pay me back with interest. At least I'll be interested, even if nobody else is. — Meryl Streep

The work will stand, no matter what. — Meryl Streep

I've thought a lot about the power of empathy. In my work, it's the current that connects me and my actual pulse to a fictional character in a made up story, it allows me to feel, pretend feelings and sorrows and imagined pain. — Meryl Streep

So it's not a thing that's a struggle. It's work, but it's not a struggle. It's fun. And she had a very particular way of emphasizing points and making her point, and that had to do with bringing out a word that you didn't normally think was the most important word in the sentence. — Meryl Streep

I really worked very hard to bring my voice back because I used to have a good voice, and to try to do my exercises that I remember from Yale and all the things in the olden days, clearing your sinuses and all that. — Meryl Streep

Show business has been really, really good to me because I can work and take a lot of time off, and I'm extremely undisciplined person. — Meryl Streep

I'm a pain in the ass to all of the costume designers with whom I work because I have very strong feelings about the subject. — Meryl Streep

While I am overwhelmingly proud of work that I, believe me, did not do on my own, I can assure you that awards have very little bearing on my own personal happiness, my own sense of well-being and purpose in the world. — Meryl Streep

A man has always been seen as someone who works hard and has a full-time occupation. I think women should have the same opportunity and not have any stigma attached to them if they choose to pursue their careers. — Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep Quotes About Heart

All an actor has, I think, is their heart, really,...that's the place you go for your inspiration. If my heart wasn't filled with them, where would I get stuff? What would I have to express? — Meryl Streep

I thought, "Why? and how did we evolve with this weak, and useless passion in tact within the deep heart's core?" And the answer as I've formulated it to myself is that empathy is the engine that powers all the best in us. — Meryl Streep

Empathy is at the heart of the actor's art. — Meryl Streep

That consciousness of quality, and the need to demand it can galvanize your energies, not just in your work, but in a rigorous exercise of mind and heart in every aspect of your life. — Meryl Streep

Take your heart to work and ask the most and best of everybody. — Meryl Streep

That is the simple secret. Always take your heart to work. — Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep Famous Quotes And Sayings

I think that you find your own way. You have your own rules. You have your own understanding of yourself, and that's what you're going to count on. In the end, it's what feels right to you. Not what your mother told you. Not what some actress told you. Not what anybody else told you but the still, small voice. — Meryl Streep

People will say to me, ‘You’ve played so many strong women,’ and I’ll say, ‘Have you ever said to a man, “You’ve played so many strong men?”’ No! Because the expectation is [men] are varied. Why can’t we have that expectation about women? — Meryl Streep

When they called my name, I had this feeling I could hear half of America going, 'Oh no. Come on... Her, again?' You know. But, whatever. — Meryl Streep

If you make the tough decisions, people will hate you today. But they will thank you for generations. — Meryl Streep

My feeling about fears is, if you voice your fears, they may come true. I'm superstitious enough to believe that. — Meryl Streep

Some people are filled by compassion and a desire to do good, and some simply don't think anything's going to make a difference. — Meryl Streep

I had this sort of idolatry for certain actors who preceded me, people who inspired me, so I'm honored to be that way for young actors. — Meryl Streep

Obsession is an attractive thing. People who are really, really interested and good at one thing and smart are attractive, if they're men. — Meryl Streep

I couldn't care less about fashion. If I had taken any clothes home, they would have remained in my closet for the rest of their existence. — Meryl Streep

So yeah, when I was a kid, when I was 16, 17, I'd come home from high school, and my dad collected all of Barbra Streisand's records. And she was very young then. I think she probably had three records out, and she was 21, and we had them all. And I knew every single song, every breath, every elision, every swell. And I sang along to it. — Meryl Streep

I once read that in any good marriage, one partner is the gardener and the other is the garden. We take it in turns to be either. — Meryl Streep

Everyone tries to look a cookie-cutter kind of way, and actually the people who look different are the ones who get picked up. — Meryl Streep

And it took to "The Devil Wears Prada" to play someone tough, who had to make hard decisions, who was running an organization, and sometimes that takes making tough decisions for a certain kind of man to empathize. That's the word - empathize. Feel the story through her. And that's the first time anybody has ever said that they felt that way. — Meryl Streep

Personality is immediately apparent, from birth, and I don't think it really changes. — Meryl Streep

How you first meet the public is how the industry sees you. You can't argue with them. That's their perception. — Meryl Streep

Everything that truly makes us happy is quite simple: love, sex, and food! Everything else - power, influence, strength - all those things can overpower what's important in life. But as long as you have food and shelter over your head, if the necessities are taken care of, what makes us happy on top of that is very simple. — Meryl Streep

Guard your good mood. — Meryl Streep

Acting is being susceptible to what is around you, and it's letting it all come in. Acting is a clearing away of everything except what you want and need - and it's wonderful in that way. And when it's right, you're lost in the moment. — Meryl Streep

Expensive clothes are a waste of money. — Meryl Streep

My family really does come first. It always did and always will. — Meryl Streep

We all make the mistake thinking that how you look makes you more worthy of love. — Meryl Streep

The progression of roles you take strings together a portrait of an actor, but it's a completely random process. — Meryl Streep

I don't know what my image is. I went to France to publicize Marvin's Room, and one really smart young woman journalist said to me, "You know, when I told people I was going to interview Meryl Streep they were so excited... all ze women in my office, they love you so much. But ze men - they are afraid of you." — Meryl Streep

I didn't go to Catholic school but I had a tough teacher, a tough math teacher.I remember everything that guy taught me. I really do. — Meryl Streep

It is interesting how fashion filters down and we discover in the "Devil Wears Prada" that we're all prey to trends, even if we think we are not. — Meryl Streep

We change who we are to fit the exogenous of our time, and not just strategically or to our own advantage, sometimes sympathetically without our even knowing it for the betterment of the whole group. — Meryl Streep

I'm older. There's some sort of seniority. As a matter of fact, the seniority ebbs as you get older. — Meryl Streep

No one has ever asked an actor, 'You're playing a strong-minded man.' We assume that men are strong-minded, or have opinions. But a strong-minded woman is a different animal. — Meryl Streep

The interesting thing about being a mother is that everyone wants pets, but no one but me cleans the kitty litter. — Meryl Streep

I would like Martin Scorsese to be interested in a female character once in a while, but I don’t know if I’ll live that long. — Meryl Streep

I never look a gift horse in the mouth. And I've been really, really lucky. I'm aware of that. And my career has been given to me by the people I've worked with, no question. The actors, the directors, the cinematographers, the writers, all of whom gave me the opportunity to work in the way that I have and I'm really grateful. — Meryl Streep

Integrate what you believe in every single area of your life. Take your heart to work and ask the most and best of everybody else, too. Don't let your special character and values, the secret that you know and no one else does, the truth - don't let that get swallowed up by the great chewing complacency. — Meryl Streep

I don't like to be gone all weekend and at night too. Because for 20 years, I've had children who are in school. — Meryl Streep

This is your time and it feels normal to you, but really, there is no normal. There's only change and resistance to it and then more change. — Meryl Streep

Sometime really good writing does you a disservice as an actor. Because you can get lazy. It's doing a lot of the work for you. I guess that's good. But at the same time with material that's not so good, you have to be more inventive, because no thought has been applied to it. — Meryl Streep

I really think there's a difference between how men critics see things than how women tend to. And I don't want to make that - it's not a generality and I don't want to say that, but I just feel - I know I do the same thing. There are certain things that I just am not that interested in. Certain kinds of films - I just don't enter them. — Meryl Streep

One must be brave if one is to take the wheel. — Meryl Streep

Let's face it, we were all once three-year-olds who stood in the middle of the living room and everybody thought we were so adorable. Only some of us grow up and get paid for it. — Meryl Streep

When your kids come home, they don't necessarily want to talk to you. They just want to know you're standing there, ready to talk. — Meryl Streep

It's so much easier to be happy. It's so much easier to choose to love the things that you have, instead of always yearning for what you're missing, or what it is that you're imagining you're missing. It is so much more peaceful. — Meryl Streep

I do honestly think that if women were running the world there would be more investment in peace, because basically as women we do not want to see our children killed. Maybe I am completely idealistic, but until we see women in equal positions of power in the world, I just think that we are doomed. — Meryl Streep

I own one pair of Prada shoes. They make my feet hurt... It's not the shoes' fault; they are exquisitely made. I blame my feet. I've got my mother's feet. — Meryl Streep

Tonight we light these candles to honor the value and the work of Jyoti Singh's short, promising life, she was India's daughter. Tonight she's our daughter too. — Meryl Streep

You know, you're not aware of it, but you're following the action of the film through the body of the protagonist, you know? You feel what he feels when he jumps, when he leaps, when he wins, when he loses. And I think I just took it for granted that, you know, we can all do that, but it became obvious to me that men don't live through the female characters. — Meryl Streep

Well my favorite is really really sharp, extra sharp, aged cheddar cheese. — Meryl Streep

Interestingly, young people don't come to you for advice. Especially the ones who are related to you. — Meryl Streep

You're perfectly balanced because then you effervesce seemingly effortlessly. And it's a thing a person can't manufacture. You either have that or you don't. You have charm or you don't. — Meryl Streep

I don't have a favorite director just like I don't have a favorite color or I don't have a favorite food. I like everything. — Meryl Streep

My advice: Don't waste so much time worrying about your skin or your weight. Develop what you do, what you put your hands on in the world. — Meryl Streep

Young people who learn the arts do better in every phase of their lives. — Meryl Streep

I think the best role models for women are people who are fruitfully and confidently themselves, who bring light into the world. — Meryl Streep

It's hard to negotiate the present landscape with a brain and a female body. — Meryl Streep

I didn't have any confidence in my beauty when I was young. I felt like a character actress, and I still do. — Meryl Streep

Having wrinkles is at once strange and exciting. — Meryl Streep

To imagine myself in different ways comes from my beginnings in the theatre. People are more accepting when you go 'apparently', 'wildly' afield from who you are or where you were brought up. — Meryl Streep

If you raise children, you forget what age they are. I mean you don't literally forget, but you treat a 13-year-old like she's 10 and there's a big difference in those three years and they can't stand it. They want to be treated like they're 17 when they're 13. And sometimes you can't help thinking of them as if they were 10 or 10 months old because it's all so recent. So we do overprotect sometimes. — Meryl Streep

Life Lessons by Meryl Streep

1. Meryl Streep is an example of hard work and dedication, having achieved success through her commitment to her craft.
2. She has also demonstrated the importance of self-confidence and believing in yourself in order to achieve your goals.
3. Finally, she has shown that it is possible to be successful and remain humble, inspiring others with her grace and generosity.